[Flip Table Now]

My table is full of heavy books and game boxes. It's surrounded by piles of comic books, and table itself is really fragile, both because of general shoddy construction and because one of the key supports was missing when I bought it so it's always been kind of wobbly.

So I didn't flip the table after today's MLP episode. That's really the only reason.

Let's start with the best parts of this... thing. The race for student pony president (aren't they a bit young for that sort of thing?) was actually decent, although Pipsqueak continues to be a total waste of space. The crusaders did literally everything, including giving all his speeches and coming up with the critical 'not being Diamond Tiara' part of his platform.

Diamond Tiara's campaign was a mix of tried and true evil (petty blackmail), with her typical narcissism. Silver Spoon tried to help her and was useless, as usual. But this time Tiara yelled at her and Spoon decided to dump her.

The part near the end where Diamond Tiara decided to use her powers of bossing everypony around for good -- that was nice too.

...

Okay. Now that I've listed everything about the episode that didn't make me want to drive to Canada and punch people...

Diamond Tiara's mom. Generic evil. Defeated by DT saying 'ha ha you have no friends'? Um... why would she have no friends? She might have no 'true' friends but part of her thing was being popular, so she should have plenty of fake ones and that soft of accusation isn't going to resonate.

Diamond Tiara herself, suddenly becoming a woobie. She had an argument with Silver Spoon and suddenly she's FOREVER ALONE.

The CMC decide to go help her with the worst dialog ever penned. I recognize this sort of dialog -- I write it myself, all the time. Then I realized that I've failed to put in any sort of characterization in the interest of forcing the plot and the result is cringeworthy generic pap, and I throw it away.

The songs. FUCK THESE SONGS. The election song was merely bad and forgettable. There were other songs, though. FUCK THOSE OTHER SONGS.

Aaand for saving Diamond Tiara, although there was some fake drama and they didn't really do anything, the CMC get cutie marks in Cutie Mark Crusading. What. I guess they're going to go into business together as professional psychologists? I'd say 'amateur' but they got their cutie marks in it, so it's probably going to be their career.

OH MY GOD, their cutie marks are RIDICULOUSLY HIDEOUS. So. Ugly.

So, this episode gets 1/3 from the pain of having to watch it, with an additional 2 point penalty for the things it defined without really needing to and did a terrible job at. -1/3.

I also realize I didn't talk about the episode from last week. This is sort of because I don't want to talk about it. I was cringing through the entire episode, almost literally. Everything about the episode made me cringe. 1/3 for cross dressing Big Mac + mopey neglected Big Mac. Of course, compared to this week's travesty, it was a masterpiece.